Pivotal - Experts & Thought Leaders

Mission 500, the security industry's non-profit charity dedicated to supporting children in need across the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico, ended ISC West 2025 on a high note with its annual awards ceremony, which celebrated individuals and organizations making a meaningful impact through service and philanthropy. The Mission 500 Awards Ceremony took place on Thursday, April 3rd, at The Bridge within the ISC West exhibit hall.  This year’s Mission 500 Humanitarian Award was presented to Allie Copeland, Chief Transformation Officer at ADI Global Distribution. The Humanitarian Award recognises individuals in the security industry who make meaningful contributions to those in need, something Copeland exemplifies through her passionate support of charitable causes like St. Baldrick’s Foundation and Mission 500 and her extensive commitment to volunteerism. Mission 500 CSR program Holmes Security Systems was recognized this year for its deep-rooted commitment The Mission 500 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program is designed to honor companies in the security industry that make important contributions to those in need. Holmes Security Systems was recognized this year for its deep-rooted commitment to community safety and disaster relief. This includes its record-breaking Crimestoppers fundraising, assistance with Hurricane Helene recovery efforts, and a company-wide culture of hands-on volunteerism that continues to uplift the communities it serves.  “We are always blown away by the generosity and dedication exhibited by those we honor through the Mission 500 awards, and this year’s honorees are no exception,” said Jason Lutz, Chair of Mission 500. “The goal of these awards is to first and foremost bring attention to those who make an effort to positively impact their communities, but also to inspire others within our industry to follow their example.”  Honouring top finishers of Mission 500 5K/2K The 2025 Mission 500 Awards Ceremony also honored top finishers of the Mission 500 5K/2K Hosted by Lutz, the 2025 Mission 500 Awards Ceremony also honored top finishers of the Mission 500 5K/2K, which took place earlier that morning at Sunset Park. Brian Gass finished in first place, followed by James Goddard in second place, and Carter Schmid in third place among the male runners.  On the women’s side, Amanda Venafro took first place, with Amanda Hoskins finishing second and Martha Entwistle coming in third. Awards were also given to the top three male and female racers in their respective age group.  Finally, Lutz surprised previous Mission 500 Co-Chairs, Janet Fenner and Tracy Larson, with the inaugural Chairman’s Award. “These ladies helped steer Mission 500 through a pivotal time in our history, helping build relationships, expand our reach, and ensure every initiative stayed true to our mission,” said Lutz. “They deserved to be recognized for their hard work, and it only seemed fitting that they be recipients of our first-ever Chairman’s Award.”

The Foundation for Advancing Security Talent (FAST) has named Jim Lantrip of Allied Universal Technology Services to the FAST Board of Directors. The FAST Board of Directors, drawn from the membership of the Electronic Security Association (ESA) and the Security Industry Association (SIA), defines and refines FAST’s strategic plan, as well as the foundation’s annual goals. Jim Lantrip Jim Lantrip is a seasoned security industry veteran with over 30 years of experience. Currently serving as the senior vice president of operations at Allied Universal Technology Services, a global systems integrator, he oversees the company’s operations, ensuring the delivery of innovative security solutions to clients on a global scale. Lantrip’s journey in the security industry began with a detour, initially joining ADT Security Services for sales experience, he unexpectedly found his niche and built a successful career spanning various roles, including sales, sales leadership, engineering, operations, and strategy. One-stop-shop solution His expertise extends to designing, delivering, and supporting a wide range of security products With a proven track record and a passion for mentoring, Lantrip has played a pivotal role in shaping the security industry. His expertise extends to designing, delivering, and supporting a wide range of security products, platforms, and services, making Allied Universal a one-stop shop for comprehensive security solutions.  Work experience Before serving in his current role, Lantrip held leadership positions in several North American security companies, contributing to their growth and success. Beyond his professional accomplishments, he is committed to fostering the next generation of security professionals; he enjoys mentoring and motivating others, introducing them to the exciting and often overlooked opportunities within the industry. “We have an exciting, largely unknown, industry that needs to draw in and develop new talent through educating the world about all the possibilities in the security world,” said Lantrip. FAST Board of Directors The FAST Board of Directors includes the following members: Chair: Kerri Sutherland, manager, human resources business partnerships, Axis Communications Vice Chair: John Nemerofsky, chief operating officer, SAGE Integration Secretary: Erin Mann, senior manager, product operations, Brivo Treasurer: Ken Kocher, president, of Force Security Solutions Scott Harkins, vice president, sales, Resideo Jim Lantrip, senior vice president of operations, Allied Universal Technology Services Brendan McFall, East Coast operations manager, Northland Controls Michal Moss Early, executive director of corporate strategy, Digital Monitoring Products Rick Seymour, chief operating officer, Guardian Hawk Security Yaron Zussman, general manager, Magos America FAST The foundation brings awareness to the career advancement opportunities within the fast-paced technology FAST is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization promoting careers in the physical security technology and life safety industry. Created in 2020 through a partnership of ESA and SIA – the industry’s major associations – FAST connects passionate, innovative professionals with new opportunities in electronic security and life safety. The foundation brings awareness to the career advancement opportunities within the fast-paced technology industry that serves to keep people, places, and property safe. FAST Jobs Board The FAST website offers job seekers information about the security industry’s growth and unique position at the convergence of cutting-edge technology and a mission that matters, the types of roles available in the industry, what employers are looking for, pioneering certifications in physical security and cybersecurity and a jobs board featuring immediate opportunities in security technology and life safety. The FAST Jobs Board allows job seekers to search by keyword, job title, and location and has featured thousands of jobs from over 800 companies. FAST’s key efforts The jobs board continues to grow in 2024 and has become the go-to destination for hiring and finding job opportunities in the security industry. FAST’s key efforts include outreach to schools, colleges, and universities to increase awareness of the exciting and rewarding careers available in security; research on the industry’s workforce development needs and possible solutions; recognition programs to celebrate the work of security technicians; events; and continuing education resources to help those already in the industry stay current with rapidly emerging and evolving technologies.

Cohesity, a pioneer in AI-powered data security and management, announces Cohesity Gaia, a first-to-market AI-powered enterprise search assistant that brings retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI and large language models (LLMs) to high-quality backup data within Cohesity environments. Cohesity Gaia will be made generally available on March 15. The conversational AI assistant enables users to ask questions and receive answers by accessing and analyzing their vast pools of enterprise data. When coupled with the Cohesity Data Cloud, these AI advancements transform data into knowledge and can help accelerate the goals of an organization while keeping data secure and compliant. Cohesity has announced plans with the three largest public cloud providers to bring their LLM services to Cohesity Gaia. Cloud and hybrid environments The underlying architecture of Cohesity Data Cloud manages and secures data with a unique blend of performance, extensibility, and scale. Cohesity Gaia extends the value proposition of Cohesity Data Cloud even further: By building a RAG AI solution on Cohesity's multicloud platform, Cohesity will be able to seamlessly provide RAG AI conversational search experiences across cloud and hybrid environments that will allow enterprises to gain deeper insights into their data and make informed decisions in the future, no matter where their stored data resides. Cohesity will maintain a fully indexed database of all files, across all workloads, and at all points in time. This robust capability supports the creation of AI-ready indexes for rapid conversational search and responses, providing enterprises with quick and accurate results. Initially, Cohesity will support Microsoft 365 and OneDrive data and will expand to more workloads over time. The unique architecture of Cohesity Gaia ensures that all indexed data is immediately available for reading without the need for backups to be reconstructed. This allows the Cohesity Data Cloud to function like a data lake, providing businesses with real-time access to their data for analysis and decision-making. The Cohesity Data Cloud employs granular role-based access controls and zero-trust security principles, ensuring that only authorized users and models have access to the necessary data. This not only protects sensitive information but also helps enterprises maintain compliance with various regulatory requirements. Integrating AI capabilities Developers must first create more copies of data, thereby increasing the threat footprint for an attack Enterprises looking to utilize LLMs often face several challenges. Developers must first create more copies of data, thereby increasing the threat footprint for an attack. What's more, the data may be incomplete or dated.  Finally, this approach requires additional time and resources, and puts an added burden on the system's performance. Cohesity Gaia overcomes these challenges by integrating AI capabilities within a customer’s backup environment. Compliance audit checks Cohesity Gaia helps organizations make better, faster decisions across a myriad of use cases, such as: To assess an organization’s level of cyber resilience. To quickly perform financial and compliance audit checks. To answer complex legal questions. To serve as a knowledge base to train new employees. Power of generative AI “Enterprises are excited to harness the power of generative AI but have faced several challenges gaining insights into secondary data, including backup, archived and vaulted data – because every approach requires re-hydrating the data, and painfully waiting weeks for the data to be available for analytics and insights. Cohesity Gaia dramatically simplifies this process with our patent-pending approach using Retrieval Augmented Generation,” said Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President, Cohesity. “With Cohesity Gaia, for the first time in our industry, companies will be able to leverage generative AI to query their data in a virtually seamless way. Our approach delivers rapid, insightful results without the drawbacks of more manual and risky approaches. In short, it turns data into knowledge within seconds and minutes.” Research and manufacturing company “We are an international materials research and manufacturing company, with research centers in many locations, and our researchers speak different languages,” said Ryan Reed, head of IT, JSR Corporation. “We want to be able to use generative AI to quickly discover if work done at one location might apply to other projects. Cohesity Gaia allows us to query our rich store of research data and quickly find relevant work. It will also allow our researchers to use their native language to query the system. This could prove incredibly valuable in accelerating the rate of our research and discovery.” Multicloud data management At the core of Cohesity AI technologies is Cohesity Turing, a patent-pending collection of AI capabilities  At the core of Cohesity AI technologies is Cohesity Turing, a patent-pending collection of AI capabilities and technologies integrated into Cohesity’s multicloud data management and security platform, providing operational and data insights.  The foundation of these AI innovations is the concept of ‘responsible AI,’ with capabilities and frameworks that enable customers to introduce AI to backup data securely and safely at scale. Role-based access controls All Cohesity Turing solutions adhere to these responsible AI principles: Transparency: Protect access to the data with role-based access controls. Promote transparency and accountability around access and policies. Governance: Ensure the security and privacy of data used by AI models and the workforce—so the right data is exposed only to the right people (and models) with the right privileges. Access: Integrate indexed and searchable data securely and easily while ensuring data is immutable and resilient. Searchable data securely “It is important to understand that Cohesity Gaia does not retrieve data like a search engine; it answers questions,” said Greg Statton, office of the CTO – Data & AI, Cohesity. “For example, if you notice a rise in costs in a region, typically, you would search for dozens of invoices, review and compare them, and see if you can discover the reason for the cost increases. It could take hours, days, or weeks to resolve. With Cohesity Gaia, you simply ask, ‘Why have costs increased in the region?’, and Cohesity Gaia will pull the relevant data from your stored data, analyze it, and return an answer to your question. It’s that simple.” Secondary protected data "Cohesity is the first data security and management vendor to bring the power of AI search to enterprises with the Cohesity Gaia AI search assistant. Gaia leverages generative AI with the latest RAG enhancements to enable conversational search across secondary protected data," said Russ Fellows, vice president, The Futurum Group Labs. “Gaia enables companies to quickly leverage their existing stored data with the power of generative AI, while preserving data security and compliance. With Cohesity Gaia, customers can quickly turn data into insights, without the complexity of creating an AI application themself, or worrying about their data privacy and security." Conversational search assistant Cohesity Gaia Virtual Event at 10 AM, PT, February 28th. Please attend this virtual event to learn more about Cohesity Gaia, the industry’s first generative AI-powered conversational search assistant. Also participating will be: Major AI product advancements from Greg Statton, Office of the CTO, Cohesity. Insights from Ryan Reed, head of IT, JSR Corporation, about the AI functionality he’s most excited about. An executive conversation with Manuvir Das, VP, Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA; Marco Casalaina, VP of Products, Azure AI at Microsoft; and Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President at Cohesity about their vision for generative AI and the pivotal role of an enterprise AI platform. A live demo showing AI's value to the data and analysis.